Saturday, April 18, 2015

Minimum Wages

As was noted here before, radio host Michael Brown of KHOW has proposed putting a ballot question on the Denver ballot for the next election to raise the Denver minimum wage to $52.80. I think this is a swell idea and I'd certainly volunteer to help gather signatures but why stop there? Let's word the proposed new law so that the city council had only two alternatives: 1. Let the minimum wage become $52.80 or 2. Repeal the minimum wage in its entirety.

I suppose it depends on whether it's a charter amendment or an ordinance. I know nothing about the ins and outs of city govt. But there might be some blowback, depending on the issue, if they reversed the will of the peasants.

To understand the arguments of capitalists against the minimum wage, follow the money. In all the thickets of pious reasoning about the merits of capitalism and the market, and of freedom of contract, and of allowing this marvelous mechanism to work its magic, and of what Adam Smith said, the key is the dollar. The rest is fraud. Carefully ignored is the question that will be crucial in coming decades: What to do about an ever-increasing number of people for whom there is no work.

There is of course much hypocrisy in the theoretical edifice. For example, businessmen argue that the minimum wage constitutes intolerable interference by the government in the conduct of business — meanwhile sending armies of lobbyists to Washington to make the government interfere in the conduct of business. In fact capitalists have no objection to federal meddling. They just want it to be such meddling as puts more money in their pockets. Nothing more. Ever.

In like fashion they say that they want to protect the worker’s freedom — yes, his freedom, such is the capitalist’s benevolence, the worker’s freedom – to sell his labor at a mutually agreed price. Curiously, in practice this means the employer’s freedom to push wages as close to starvation as he can get away with. This miraculous congruence of high principle with high profit is among the wonders of the universe....